Sailing the 7 C’s of security monitoring

What is it your mom used to say? “A watched pot never boils.” This might be true, but a watched pot also never spills; it never allows your younger sister to stick her hand in the hot water; prevents Uncle Jack from tasting before dinner is ready; and if something unforeseen happens, there is time to mitigate the problems.

One of the established best practices in InfoSec is monitoring. People, products and companies get paid a great deal of money and expend a great deal of resources to watch pots. Monitoring simply is the central component to any security initiative. If you don’t watch it, it still happens, (trees in forest fall and still make sounds), you’re simply not aware to possibly prevent the issue, to control the damage, or protect the assets for spiraling beyond your control. Monitoring is the baseline to accountability and responsibility. It provides the necessary information to make risk-based decisions regarding assets supporting core missions and business functions.

But with all best practices, there are variables. How much to monitor? What priorities matter? Where are my greatest vulnerabilities? To this end, I have boiled down monitoring to 7 best practices…The 7 C’s of security monitoring:

Consistency

Continuous

Correlation

Contextual

Compliant

Centralization

Cloud

Consistency – Every company is different. Each has their own thresholds of organizational risk. A credit union or health clinic is much more likely to need a higher bar than an air and heating contractor. However, this doesn’t mean the smaller company can ignore risk. It simply means (typically) the levels and layers that require monitoring are less complex. The key to consistency is process. And to divine a process you must first define a strategy, agree on the measures and metrics and follow through with a monitoring program. Start with understanding how your users interact with the network and the various risk that proposes. Once you know what needs to be monitored and the baselines (risk tolerance) of what constitutes alerts and other suspicious activity, then you can build a program and standardize that configuration and analyze the results to make adjustments. From there it is wash, rinse and repeat.

Recently the Department of Homeland Security director of federal network resilience noted: as you move to standardize configurations networks are not only more secure but they lower operational costs. “There is almost a trifecta of controlling cost, increasing service and improving security,”he said.

Continuous –Hackers don’t sleep, so why should your security? It is understood that continuous monitoring is the best method to prevent breaches, discover anomalies and, and control assets. However, there are differences of opinion as to what does continuous mean. Are you to hire a dedicated analyst to watch every ping, blurp and log? Guards armed with wiener dog lasers in front of your server room? Of course not. In this case, our working definition of “continuous” is unique for every organization and needs to be commensurate with their risk and resources. NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) recommends an ongoing “frequency sufficient to support risk-based security decisions as needed to adequately protect organization information.” Despite the variable vagueness of that statement, the goal nonetheless must be 7/24/365 coverage. To achieve this degree of continuity, an initiative requires a series of automated processes and controls combined with the expertise to analyze vulnerability and initiate action. Yet the lynchpin for effectiveness of a round-the-clock strategy is that it is doing in real time. See the “C” for cloud, to show you this approach is affordable, efficient and manageable. If there are issues, as you define them, you get the alerts immediately, not a week later as you look through log transcripts. Continuous monitoring is about proactivity, as much as it is about response. In that it allows for such immediacy in action mitigates any potential threat.

Continuous monitoring has been defined by NIST and the SANS 20 Critical Security Controls as key to reducing risk in IT environments. Now I am not saying continuous monitoring is a silver bullet, but it certainly lessens the possibility of attack, carelessness and operational failure.

Correlation: In the modern enterprise, there are simply too many silos of information, too many endpoints for access, too many variables of risk and not enough visibility or resources to properly protect all the assets of an enterprise. Monitoring in its simplest form looks at one of the silos, one of the applications– it examines possible events, or log-ins, or credentials. To enhance the effectiveness, there needs to be a tight collaboration of all the resources. This expands the visibility and creates a more accurate view of all online and network assets. Correlation needs to tie together the cooperative capabilities of such tools as SIEM, Log Management, Identity and Access Management, malware scanning, etc… If security is about maintaining visibility, correlation would be its magnifying glass. Or to mix my metaphors, it’s like a lens on a camera that can bring blurry visions into sharp focus. For example good correlation removes the specter of false positives and more. Consider, the entitlement management configuration from an Access Management feature set is part of the correlation engine of SIEM to help distinguish authorized access from suspicious activity. The resulting alerts happen in real time and provide the directed response necessary to remediate any issues. Additionally, all of this detail is historically recorded for various reports and compliance regulations through the log management capabilities.

Correlation is rooted in the aspects of consistency. You first need to know the landscape in order to create the rules. The rules of correlation create the baseline in which to manage a consistent initiative. This also goes a long way in underscoring the next 2 C’s Context and Compliance.

Context: Automation can make the process of continuous monitoring more cost-effective, consistent, and efficient. But continuous monitoring without intelligence can result in simply more data. For example, the network processes an application log in request from an approved user name and password. That in itself is not remarkable. However, the IP address doesn’t match the user’s usual location or a device’s usual behavior. This one is coming from Zagreb. Is Mike from sales in Zagreb? The system says no, because only 4 short hours ago he was logging off from an office in Denver. This situational awareness raises a red flag and escalates an alert. And because this is done in real time, IT catches the activity and is able to block access.

Compliance: The common thread for the alphabet soup that is compliance (HIPAA, PCI, FISMA, FFIEC, CIP, SOX, etc…) is the need to know who is logging in, accessing what assets and ensuring only the appropriately credentialed users can do those things. When you are dealing with sensitive information like credit card numbers, social security numbers, patient history/records, and the like, the need to have a strong and continuous monitoring initiative is not just a driving force to avoid fines, but it is the basis of good and trustworthy operation.

So much has been written about compliance and network security, so that all I will add is understand the responsibility you have towards customers, partners, employees, users, accurately calculate the risk in maintaining their information and vigilantly maintain the monitoring process that makes you a good steward of their trust. And of course, a solid monitoring strategy will provide the industry regulators the reporting and evidence of your compliance.

Centralization: With all the moving parts and all the silos, device types and elements to monitor, without a means to centralize, a security infrastructure becomes disjointed, uncoordinated and considerably harder to manage. The continual increase in daily network threats and attacks makes it challenging to maintain not only a complex heterogeneous environment but to also ensure compliancy by deploying network-wide security policies. The ability to forensically analyze the infrastructure under a single pane of glass is not just a convenience factor, but one that seals up the vulnerability cracks.

Cloud: Best practice monitoring requires more than just a pair of eyes. The strategy includes investment in a variety of solutions, tools, servers, analysts and more. For many companies, this is not tenable in terms of human resources, budgets and core competencies. This is why continuous monitoring from the cloud (aka security-as-a-service) provides the great equalizer. Through the application of cloud-based security, a small health clinic in Bozeman, Montana can wrangle to same enterprise capabilities as New York Presbyterian. The only difference is the necessary scale to achieve a strong deployment and sustainable initiative.

Addressing the issue from the cloud solves several pressing issues while providing the necessary heft to create the visibility to govern credentialing policies, remediate threats and satisfy compliance requirements across any sized enterprise. What’s more, all the solutions noted from above – from SIEM to Access Management—are available from the cloud. And there are a few providers that can harness all the solutions collectively and centralize them under that single pain of glass.

As you embark to set sail on the 7 C’s, leave a note for your mother to watch the pot.